


Of All The Stars, The Loveliest

by bluebeholder



Category: Wonder Woman (2017)
Genre: Background Sappho, Body Image, F/F, Fluff, I Will Build This Tag From The Ground Up, Inspired by Poetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-15
Updated: 2017-06-15
Packaged: 2018-11-14 10:43:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11206422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluebeholder/pseuds/bluebeholder
Summary: It's hard to live in a tiny little flat with a physical goddess, especially when just hearing her talk makes you go weak at the knees. Etta is quite sure that if she ever says anything to Diana, she'll get laughed right out of the room.What she doesn't know is that Diana gets a little weak in the knees when Etta talks, too.





	Of All The Stars, The Loveliest

**Author's Note:**

> ALL ABOARD. Work #3 in the tag, I challenge all of you to start adding. Let's get this going! We can do it!
> 
> Heavy petting, brief nudity, and that's pretty much it.

“While I see the point of typewriters,” Diana says, cracking her knuckles and flexing her hands with a wince, “I feel that someone should perhaps have considered comfort in their making.”

Etta tuts and wraps the warm compress around the other woman’s large hands. “Function and comfort don’t go together.”

Diana raises her eyebrows. “Etta. I have worn my corset and a corset like yours, and though mine has by far the better function it doesn’t chafe.”

“It didn’t fit you,” Etta points out, sitting down beside Diana at their tiny table. The flat is not particularly large to begin with, and it feels smaller with Diana here, all large hands and surprisingly coltish limbs and loud voice and laugh. Nothing fits Diana. “We’ll get you one that does.”

“I don’t need one,” Diana mutters mutinously. She sighs and slumps down, stretching her arms across the table and pressing her cheek against it. “It’s silly. You don’t need one either.”

“Oh, yes I do,” Etta says. She looks down at herself—all those curves, the ones that make dresses so difficult to wear—and sighs. “Nothing fits unless you wear one.”

Over the curve of Diana’s arm, Etta can only see one of the other woman’s eyes. “Then they should make clothes that will fit without a corset.”

“Who’d do something silly like that?” Etta asks wearily. Sometimes, Diana’s endless fire for change is exhilarating, and other times… “I’m just all the wrong shapes, I’m afraid.”

“You are not,” Diana says loudly. She sits up fast, nearly glaring. The fire in her eyes is enough to make Etta shy away. “Etta, you’re all the right shapes, every one of them. We have statues of Aphrodite on Themyscira and you are every bit as beautiful as she.”

Etta laughs, nervous. “I’m nothing of the sort,” she says. “Goddess are beautiful. You should know—aren’t you one?” Diana is beautiful, terrifyingly beautiful, and so unconscious of the way that she affects the world around her. Her presence spreads like the sun rising over London, turning some heads toward her and others away because they’re afraid they’ll be blinded. Etta herself prefers to turn toward the light, risking blindness just to see for a brief second this woman she so desperately wants.

Oh, Etta knows she can never say one word about any of this to Diana. She’s too perfect. It won’t be long before Diana is snapped up by some gorgeous Adonis of a man. Etta won’t know what to do with herself. When she hears Diana’s laugh she goes weak at the knees and her voice disappears and sparks go shivering all over her skin. And when Diana talks to a man Etta feels like nothing so much as dead grass, trodden and left behind on someone’s heel. 

“Who cares if I’m a goddess?” Diana says, waving a hand in dismissal. “That doesn’t mean anything at all. There are women of all shapes on Themyscira—though we haven’t got any with hair as beautiful as yours.” Her eyes linger on Etta’s hair, and it makes Etta positively tingle. She squirms a little under the scrutiny, because who wouldn’t when Diana looks at them?

Etta pulls herself together and scoffs. “What, my carrot top? Come off it, Diana, darling.”

Diana reaches across the table and tucks a loose curl back behind Etta’s ear. “I won’t come off of anything,” she says firmly. “You’re beautiful, Etta.”

“I’m no Amazon,” Etta says with a nervous giggle. She feels like she might just twitch right out of her chair. Diana hasn’t taken her hand away. Rather, she’s very gently cupping the side of Etta’s face, and it feels like Etta is going to go up in flames.

“What, because you don’t have a sword?” Diana smiles impishly. “You’re very good at fisticuffs, if I remember right.”

“Still!”

Diana tilts her head, long dark waves of hair tumbling over her shoulders and off to the side. Etta tries not to be mesmerized. “Why are you so determined to hate yourself?”

“Pardon me!” Etta huffs. “I like myself quite a lot!”

“Then why are you so unkind to yourself?” 

The question is terribly incisive. Etta tries to think of an answer, and can’t. “I don’t know,” she says quietly. “Because I’m…flabby, I suppose. I’ve got the shrillest voice this side of anywhere. I’m far too loud and I talk too much.”

“You don’t talk enough,” Diana says. Her thumb strokes along Etta’s cheek and brushes away a tear Etta hadn’t even felt fall. “Your voice is as musical as an aulos. And being flabby doesn’t make you any less lovely.”

“I don’t hold a candle to you,” Etta says. 

Diana pulls a face. “What is this need to compare one woman to another?” she asks. “It serves no purpose but to drive us all further apart. I am beautiful and you are beautiful and together we are still beautiful. Do you see?”

Etta’s brain stopped working somewhere around the word “together”.

“Etta,” Diana says gently. “Stand up and look at me, face to face, my friend, unloose the beauty of your eyes…that’s Psappha. Sappho, in the translation, I suppose.”

“My eyes are my one good feature, I suppose,” Etta says shakily. She doesn’t know who Sappho is, but the poetry sounds nice. “What else did your poet say?”

“You are, of all the stars, the loveliest,” Diana says. She smiles, and it’s so sweet that Etta thinks her heart is going to melt. “I think you’re perfect, as perfect a woman as I’ve ever seen.”

All Etta can do is blink very fast and hope against hope that this moment doesn’t end. 

And then, because Diana doesn’t know how to stop, she inquires very politely, “Is it all right if I kiss you, Etta?”

“Oh—yes?” Etta chokes out.

She doesn’t get the opportunity to rethink that decision, because suddenly Diana has leaned in and her ridiculous beautiful lips are on Etta’s. Etta can’t think because oh, Heavens, this is the best thing she’s ever experienced in her life. They’re sitting so awkwardly that their knees bump together, and Etta is clutching the arms of the chair for dear life because she thinks she’ll pitch right onto the floor if she lets go, and Diana probably has the side of the table digging into her ribs, but it’s perfect. Etta didn’t know what “nectar and ambrosia” meant until right this minute, but she does now and she’ll never forget it. It tastes like the suet pudding they ate for dinner and the custard tart they had for afters, and there’s the strangest crackle of something that must be magic on Diana’s tongue.

“You’re so—soft,” Diana says, as if in wonderment. Her eyes are huge and round and stark in the bare kitchen light. She looks like a storybook knight brought to life, like a painting in an art gallery, like a noble statue in a garden. Nothing like anyone who should be in this kitchen. 

“That’s what comes of a life of leisure,” Etta says nervously. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and shivers. “I suppose you didn’t like that, much.”

Diana shakes her head, and suddenly looks fierce. “I liked that a lot,” she says. “I want to kiss you again.” Her voice is the same as the one that she uses when she’s protesting for suffrage (which they are never doing again, after she punched a policeman) or when someone speaks rudely to an Irishman in a pub (which they are never going back to, after she broke the bar) or when she’s evicting someone for speaking badly about the Indian family that lives in this building (which Etta will let her do any time). It’s the voice that means business.

“You should kiss me again before I lose my nerve,” Etta says with a crack in her voice.

With all her single-minded determination Diana plunges in again and somehow before Etta knows it Diana has picked her up out of her chair and set her down on the table. “Diana!”

“There are some advantages,” Diana says breathlessly, “to having the strength of a goddess.”

Etta lets out a squeak and all she has time to do is hang on desperately to Diana’s defined shoulders because Diana is chasing Etta’s kiss like she’s chasing down a miscreant. There’s an awful lot of skirt in the way of everything and the table is creaking alarmingly and Etta doesn’t give a damn. Diana, Princess of Themyscira, is fumbling around trying to work out where to put her hands—they’ve jumped from Etta’s hips to her shoulders to the table in the span of seconds—and making shocked noises because Etta has attacked the buttons on her dress with her own determination. If they’re doing this then they are doing this and Etta doesn’t give a damn. 

“Bed?” Etta asks, looking Diana dead in the eye. Where her nerves went, she doesn’t know, but they’re gone. She’s not asking too many questions. 

“Bed,” Diana gasps, and sweeps Etta off the table. There’s only about ten steps from the kitchen into the bedroom and Etta has a fleeting thought that she’ll never be able to sleep here again as Diana sets her down. Etta goes for her own buttons as Diana yanks off her clothes—they are going to be darning for a month—and in short order they’re both stripped down. 

That’s when Etta’s nerves surge back full force. Diana is all muscle, waist narrow without a corset, skin smooth and beautiful. Etta has rolls and her breasts sag to the sides and she’s got lumps and wrinkles and—Diana is staring at her with an expression like she’s been punched. 

“Sweet Aphrodite, you’re beautiful,” Diana whispers. 

It feels like there are fireworks going off inside of Etta.

***

She wakes up the next morning to a cold bed and the industrious clatter of typewriter keys in the kitchen. Etta gets up and pulls on a robe, yawning sleepily, and wanders out to see what Diana’s about this morning. But Etta stops immediately in the doorway, feeling her eyes pop wide, and decides that she wasn’t dreaming last night after all. 

Diana is sitting stark naked at the table, working at the typewriter. She breaks into a brilliant grin when Etta walks in. “Good morning,” she says. 

“Morning?” Etta says. She feels a little faint and busies herself putting the kettle on.

“I think I’m getting the hang of this,” Diana says. The wood floor creaks under her feet and suddenly her hand is on the counter, practically holding Etta in place since Diana’s standing right behind her. Diana leans around to present a paper, hooking her chin over Etta’s shoulder.

_And I recall Etta Candy, whose sweet step_  
Or that flicker of light on her face,  
I’d rather see than French tanks,  
Or the armed ranks of the Tommies. 

Etta is blushing so hard she thinks she’ll burst. “Sappho?” she asks, looking up at Diana. 

“Well, I took out Anaktoria and the Lydian chariots,” Diana says with a shrug. She leans down and kisses Etta again, and it takes everything off of Etta’s mind. She feels—beautiful. She feels like an Amazon.

**Author's Note:**

> Hey look, a history note. :3 
> 
> I used [this archive](http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Greek/Sappho.htm) of Sappho’s poetry to inspire and inform the story. 
> 
> The aulos: an ancient Greek wind instrument that was supposed to sound “penetrating, insisting, and exciting”. Diana totally is calling Etta’s voice shrill in the nicest way possible.
> 
> (Lemme just point out, for those of you who followed me over from FBAWFT and have read "Shell Shock", that you should have SEEN the aneurysm I had in the theater when Steve started putting on his uniform and he didn't have enough layers. That was the only point of historical accuracy that I couldn't get with. Fucking history, man...just too much for me.)


End file.
